Thursday, 25 June 2009

The United Nations recently reported that Canada is a top producer of ecstasy and methamphetamine. Read about it here at the Winnipeg Sun.

According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime's 2009 World Drug Report, which was released this morning in Washington, Canada has become a major player on the world market for amphetamine-type stimulants (ATS), such as methamphetamine and Ecstasy.

[..]

Manufacture of Ecstasy in 2007 was reported in just eight countries. Among them: Canada.

[...]

"Canada-based organized crime groups' participation in the methamphetamine trade has grown significantly since 2003," the report says. "By 2006, law enforcement intelligence noted that Asian organized crime and traditional outlaw motorcycle gangs operating in Canada had increased the amount of methamphetamine they manufactured and exported, primarily into the USA, but also to Oceania and East and South-East Asia. For example, Australia identified that methamphetamine from Canada accounted for 83% of total seized imports by weight, for Japan the figure was 62%. Although only 5% of domestically manufactured methamphetamine was exported in 2006, by 2007 that figure was 20%."

[...]

Since 2003-04, Canada has become the "primary source of Ecstasy-group substances," such as MDMA, MDA MDEA/MDE for North American markets and increasingly for other regions, the UN report said.

"As of 2007, identified Ecstasy laboratories were large-capacity facilities primarily controlled by Asian organized crime groups, utilizing precursor chemicals trafficked from China in sea containers. In 2007, it was estimated that 50% of domestically produced Ecstasy was trafficked outside of Canada. Most of this was thought to be destined for the USA, Australia and Japan," the report said.

I stopped blogging about drug arrest reports published in the Toronto Star because I felt that I would be picking on the Asian community since more often than not those arrested had Asian names (mostly Vietnamese and Chinese).

That being said, Canada's rise up the list of drug producing nations is shameful and is due in large part to unnecessary immigration from Asia. What I mean by this is that Canada accepts too many immigrants from too few source countries and China, along with India, is one of them.

China has continuously topped the list of source countries of immigrants to Canada not becuase we need them but simply because applicants from that country flood the immigration system due to the large size of China's population. Same can be said of the refugee stream.

This large influx provides good cover for criminal elements to slip right in and set up shop.

Read here about the largest ecstasy bust in the history of York Region (located just north of Toronto); and here , here and here.

Read here about the Vietnamese take over of the pot trade in British Columbia.

And with the increasing influx of South American immigrants into Canada we can expect to see a new kid on the block.

As long as Canada stubbornly refuses to lower immigration targets to what the nation actually needs and not what the immigration industry wants it will be difficult to effectively police our borders and weed criminals out.

Saturday, 20 June 2009

A new study was released dispelling the over exaggerated, and oftentimes unsubstantiated, benefits of Canada's current immigration. The Toronto Star reports on it here.

From the article we read:

The rags-to-riches immigrant stories Canada has been bred on don't work anymore...given the increasingly fragile economy, many of the standard methods of dealing with newcomers are making their lives worse.

"The whole argument that, like they did in the `60s and `70s, immigrants will start off in survival jobs and move to stable jobs – that doesn't happen," said Patricia Landolt of the Centre for Urban and Community Studies at the University of Toronto

"Rather than wait around while we create an underclass, we need to deal with this now."

Systemic discrimination cannot be blamed for this as implied by the following:

And not just for immigrants, she added. As of 2006, more than 40 per cent of all workers in Ontario worked in low-wage service jobs.

It appears low waged service jobs were the cause of the alleged labour shortages in Ontario and across the country. How about that? Toronto has become 50% visible minority and 50% immigrant because Tim Hortons needs people to serve coffee. How's that for nation building?

The study also found:

Despite an immigration policy designed to lure "the best and the brightest," education had no impact on whether immigrants ended up in a precarious job. The only thing that made a difference was the ability to speak English.

Temporary foreign workers "set the floor on how far down you can push everyone else," said Landolt.

On-the-job training helps improve immigrants' working lives, but government education and training strategies don't have much impact.

More than 75 per cent worked in non-union jobs and more than 70 per cent worked only part-time. Sixty per cent had weak or vague contracts. More than a third were paid cash.

The study created an index of precarious work that factors together various measures (benefit deductions, full time work, how wages are paid) under a single index which taken together "result in jobs that are dirty, dangerous and difficult". You can find the study here.

Some of the study's findings are not new. It has been known for quite a while that an immigrant's ability to fluently communicate in either of Canada's official languages was key to his or her success yet the majority of immigrants to Canada cannot speak English or French. It is also well understood that temporary foreign workers have a negative economic impact on wages and that government programs designed to assist immigrants in finding work seems to only create work social workers than to find work for anyone else.

Unions should also take note that immigration is an attack on union strength in this country so why are union leaders and the NDP silent on demanding lower immigration targets when it is apparent Canada accepts too many immigrants?

The Toronto Star's bias against any negative news of the immigration system was apparent in the treatment it gave this study. For one thing it is difficult to dismiss it as racist or right-wing reactionary propaganda since it was a joint effort between researchers at the University of Toronto and York University, two schools that are more often than not cheer leaders of immigration and multiculturalism.

So it buried it on the bottom right of page 4 in the "Greater Toronto" section of the paper. The only other thing the paper could do if it really wanted to punish it was to not report on it at all so to the paper's credit at least it didn't do that. Mind you, this was published in a print edition where the trivialities of a feud between hair salons in upscale Yorkville was deemed important enough to give it the front page headline. It seems the grand social transformations and negative economic consequences of Canada's immigration system are not worth much of the paper's consideration nor that of Torontonians. The hair salon dispute attracted 96 comments whereas the immigration study attracted a mere 7. That's right. Torontonians are more opinionated about a hair salon dispute than the traffic congestion, population density, social fragmentation, and increasing poverty and crime that mass immigration is bringing to the city. This is just another reason why Toronto deserves less seats in Parliament, not more.

Is the paper intentionally publishing pro-mass immigration propaganda in the wake of the study's negative conclusions? I don't know but it is coincidental and suspicious. After all these stories, which are not real news, are the positive mirror images of, say, reports involving black criminals. In both cases due to the frequency of reporting the individual at the centre of the story tends to typify those of their community but in the latter case it is unwanted and unintentional. A news report of a black man shooting a gun does not typify all black males and it is wrong to do so in one's mind. Likewise an "immigrant success story" does not typify all immigrants and it is wrong to assume it does. Doing so does more harm than good because it causes one to think that there is nothing wrong with the immigration system preventing us from doing anything to fix the real problems that do afflict it.

Friday, 19 June 2009

I don't care for professional sports and this includes the NHL. Professional sports gets more attention then it deserves. I do enjoy sports but I have no personal preference for hockey just because I am Canadian. I am proud of the sport becuase it is Canadian and is recognized as such throughout the world. So what does it say about the future of hockey when Canadians stop playing it and what does this say about a unique Canadian identity?

Here is a story about the death of hockey in Scarborough,ON which borders Toronto on the city's east side.

Hockey tough sell to new Canadians

In Scarborough, the game has failed to attract immigrants, partly because it has become too priceyJun 15, 2009 04:30 AMKenyon WallaceJohn SpearsStaff Reporters

Hockey in Scarborough is dying, the victim of a changing population that prefers to play soccer, cricket and even badminton.

The demographics of Scarborough explains the rise of these relatively banal sports. Soccer is the most popular sport in the world and the infusion of Latino and African immigrants into the city would be the push behind this. There are many South Asian immigrants in Scarborough as well particularly Sri Lankan Tamils and this would explain cricket. Asian immigrants mostly from China have settled in Scarborough too and this would help explain the popularity of badminton.

The head of the Scarborough Hockey Association, which has ruled the sport in the area for 53 years, warned local politicians this week that organized minor hockey could be dead within two years.

In a blunt speech that was part funeral oration, part Old Testament prophecy, John Kelloway said hockey organizations have failed to attract immigrants to the game – partly because it has become too expensive and partly because of the assumption Canadian kids will always play the game.

Fifteen years ago, Kelloway's association had 10,000 players. Today there are just 2,800.

A legal battle is also cited as contributing to the demise of minor league hockey in Scarborough. But though the story emphasizes the cost of the sport as a prohibitive factor (and it is expensive) the real reason is that immigrants don't care about hockey. Period. If they wanted to play they would find a way but they don't.

This story is nothing new. I do recall the local city news station CityTV doing a report on the death of a city hockey house league for the same reason: immigrants to the area failed to support the sport choosing to play other sports instead.

Immigrants are not compelled to play hockey, of course. But how are they nation building when they are erasing a cultural characteristic of Canada simply by choosing to ignore it? How is Canada better for it?

This isn't the death knell for hockey in Canada. It is alive and strong in the "white flight" areas around the city as implied by this:

Overall, Oakman said, the GTHL – an amalgam of 93 local hockey organizations – hasn't suffered a drop in players because growing cities such as Vaughan are "bursting at the seams" with players.

Several questions arise from this. How is Canada's cultural identity strengthened when immigrant groups don't care to preserve it? How sincere are immigrants in becoming Canadians? Should Canada refashion its immigration system to favour those who will most likely preserve a Canadian cultural identity?

Canadians should be aware that one of the costs of mass immigration coupled with a multicultural societal model is that Canadians risk losing that which makes them unique in the world. Multiculturalism doesn't strengthen Canada's identity, it erases it.

One thing to keep in mind when read jobless figures is that they do not accurately reflect the health of the labour market. Underemployment, temporary and seasonal work, as well as part time work are not factored in nor does it reflect the quality of work available such as full time minimum wage jobs vs. well paying assembly line work.

Also, those who have given up looking for work are not considered unemployed. That being said the unemployment figures are likely higher.

Climbing debt levels have put Canadian households under increased financial strain amid surging job losses, stagnating income growth and slumping personal wealth, a report by the Bank of Canada says.

Since immigrant cohorts of the past several years are doing much worse then previous cohorts (back when Canada's immigration system actually worked) I wonder to what extent this report by the Bank of Canada applies to them. After all, Canada's banks have been agressively targeting immigrant communities and selling them mortgages and lines of credit.

Across the province, almost 130,000 households are waiting for provincially subsidized housing with wait times that run from several years to several decades, depending on the location.

If you visit any government subsidized housing unit in Toronto you'll come to the realization that many of those units, if not most, are going to immigrants effectively shutting out Canadians. But since this only affects those on the lower rungs of Canadian society Canada's elites and their mouth pieces in the media don't really care since the benefits of diversity that they enjoy outweigh the costs that are borne by Canada's working class.

I know I am focusing on the negative but doing so sobers one up and adds counterweight to the over exaggerated claims and contributions, mostly superficial benefits, that characterize media coverage of immigrants and the current immigration system. Canada has been importing too many people for too long and instead of nation building we may just be creating a swelling immigrant underclass.

Friday, 5 June 2009

I meant to write this post in honour of earth day. Earth day is the day of the year when Canadians fashionably care about the environment by recycling (or something) and then spend the rest of the year polluting it by over consuming and driving their cars to the corner store or to walk the dog. It is also the day when Canada's environmentalists put their stupidity on display and totally ignore the environmental costs of mass immigration while wagging their fingers at everyone and everything else.

The province yesterday announced it would allow Barrie to annex thousands of hectares of agricultural land from Innisfil for future growth. It also launched a study for a massive employment zone on either side of Highway 400 in the Town of Innisfil.

[...]

If approved, critics say, these moves would kill efforts to contain growth and would bring suburban sprawl to the area stretching from Bradford West Gwillimbury to Barrie, an area that is now mostly thousands of hectares of farmland, located north of the protected greenbelt that caps the outer edges of the GTA. That would put massive pressure on Highway 400, the main north-south route in the region.

Highway 400 is a north/south route leading into and out of Toronto. It is traveled to reach the various communities located outside of the city and it has become, and is becoming, awfully crowded. There are several reasons why we should be concerned.

The first is peak oil. Former CICB economist Jeff Rubin talks about it here in a Toronto Star article about his book Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller. I don't know how real this is. It may be a bunch of alarmist Chicken Little speculations capitalizing on worst case scenarios. But it is a real possibility and we should, as a food producing nation, be prepared for it.

What peak oil means is higher oil prices which means higher fuel costs and thus transportation costs as well as a general increase in any petroleum based product. When the price of oil goes up then so does the price of food which is what happed when gas rose to above a $1 a litre and it looks like it will happen again.

The other problem is urban sprawl. From the linked Toronto Star article about former Toronto mayor John Sewell's new book, The Shape of the Suburbs: Understanding Toronto's Sprawl.

"The Toronto urbanized area," Sewell writes, "had more than tripled, from 193 square miles in the 1950s to 656 square miles by the end of the 1990s, but the population had only doubled. Residential density in the former City of Toronto in the 1990s, built up mostly by the start of the Second World War, was 7,000 units per square mile; in the rest of the Metro Toronto (including the outer suburbs of North York, Etobicoke and Scarborough which were built largely between 1950 and 1985), it was 3,300 units per square mile. The population comparison was similar: 20,000 residents per square mile in the former city; 8,000 in the rest of Metro; and 4,700 in the developed portion of the fringes."

Sewell also quotes a 1995 study that showed "that in the former City of Toronto there are an average of 49 residents and jobs per urbanized acre, and in Metro Toronto as a whole, 23. In the fringes the ratio was much lower: Mississauga, 14; Brampton, 16; Markham, 13; Vaughan, 9; and Richmond Hill, 9."

[...]

But what the board didn't look at was the cost of suburban job creation. As Sewell documents, it is enormous. In addition to the loss of much of Canada's finest farmland, the price in pollution and health is disturbing. According to Sewell, each year about 1,700 people in the Toronto area die prematurely because of "poor air quality."

One of the major causes is vehicular emissions. Even so, getting people out of their cars won't be so easy.

The densities of sprawl communities are too low to justify public transit, which in turn encourages the car dependency on which they were based in the first place. That's why there are 1.5 metres of road per resident in the city core, 5.5 in the outer suburbs.

In this way, Sewell points out, "low-density development has imposed much higher capital and operating costs than more compact development ... in the order of $1 billion per year in the GTA, or more than $1,000 per family per year for those living in the fringes."

Toronto and the surrounding area is situated on some of the most fertile land in the country. This also includes the Niagara Region, home to some of Canada's finest wine producers.

The Ontario Farm Animal Council sponsored a forum in Guelph, Ontario that was held in March of 2009. It was stated at this forum that Ontario could be an "agricultural leader". Canada is a net exporter of food with Ontario exporting 50% of its pork products to the United States. Ontario is home to 1/3 of Canada's population but less than 2% of Ontario's population are farmers yet are able to feed a lot of people. And with Ontario's rich soil the province can invest in agriculture to feed a growing world population to help fill the void being left by the dwindling manufacturing sector. What can undermine Ontario's agricultural position, the OFAC realizes, is urban sprawl.

With the advent of peak oil, communities around the world will have to become more dependent on home grown produce. Imported foods will become luxuries. What position will Canada be in if we have paved over much of the nation's arable land to build communities to accommodate the unnecessary mass importation of people the nation didn't need to fill jobs that don't exist? To add salt to the wound, peak oil will compel individuals to move closer to their jobs and to urban centers leaving the suburban communities they moved to because of cheap fuel and housing depopulated, laying waste to the land that could have been used for agricultural production.

The city of Barrie's growth was fueled by cheap gas and housing as well as "white flight". Now the city has reached its limits and is seeking to annex neighbouring lands. Toronto's satellite city of Brampton also owes it growth to cheap gas and housing but also to mass immigration primarily from south Asia. Both cities are cultural waste lands home to traffic problems, over population, and are both pushing urban sprawl onto farmlands. And a lot of this is caused by mass immigration. Sacrificing Canada's biodiversity and agricultural potential for cultural diversity and Liberal party votes is not worth it. In the end, at least in Brampton's case, all the Canada will gain is another unlivable suburban slum.

Canada's environmentalists need to address mass immigration as one of the most impending threats to Canada's environment. It is people who drive cars, over consume, drink water out of plastic bottle, produce garbage. Indeed Canadians are one of the most wasteful people in the world. I don't know why environmentalists don't oppose mass immigration more vocally since much of it is unnecessary.

Monday, 1 June 2009

Canadians are told ad nauseam by our betters in the media and in politics that multiculturalism, and by default mass immigration that supports it, is one of several things that defines Canada to the world. This is an odd thing to say since multiculturalism and mass immigration are effectively erasing two key characteristically Canadian icons that most Canadians cherish over multiculturalism and would agree that defines the nation more so.

The first one is ice hockey. Immigrants don't play ice hockey. They play soccer and cricket and it is only a matter of time before soccer and cricket surpass hockey in popularity relegating that sport to a niche interest played by Canada's future minority white population. This is a sad fate that awaits Canada's national pass time since Canada is one of a few countries in the world to produce a sport that is also played internationally. What kind of future does ice hockey have when most of the population of the country of that sport's birth are completely indifferent to it? What about the Grey Cup, one of Canada's biggest sporting events?

The other tragedy will be Canada's health care system. Canada cannot afford a mass immigration system and a public health care system at the same time. The former will eventually bankrupt the latter.

Here is a Toronto Star article about the lack of hospital services in Toronto's growing 905 region (so called because of the area code). The region's hospital services cannot keep up with its population growth. The 905 area is also where many immigrants are now settling instead of the city of Toronto itself driving that region's population growth rate. Is there a relation between immigrant settlement patterns and over stressed health care services? Of course there is. A visit to any hospital ER in Toronto should make this point obvious.

Toronto and the surrounding region attracts the bulk of immigrants to the nation. Without a corresponding growth in the number of practicing doctors, other health care sector workers, and services as well it should come to no surprise that Canada has a doctor shortage and that wait times have increased.

Many will argue that Canada doesn't have a doctor shortage but a problem recognizing foreign medical credentials. I think this is true for some since Canada's professional classes have erected the artificial barrier of "Canadian experience" (what does that even mean?) to protect their salaries from the negative effects of mass immigration. But the elephant in the room is that many if not most foreign trained medical professionals are not up to par with Canadian standards with some possessing falsified documents. This bit of information creeps up in the few instances when a representative of Canada's health care sector is allowed to speak candidly.

Then there is the question of whether Canada's immigrant population have paid enough in taxes to support the use of Canada's health care system or are they being subsidized by Canadians?

Canada's health care system is experiencing unnecessary stress due to mass immigration most of which is itself unnecessary and superfluous. This is of little concern to Canada's politicians who can easily afford private health insurance and fly to the United States if need be while courting the ethnic vote with promises of more immigration and eased immigration laws. For those they represent this is not an option. If Canadians realized that mass immigration is helping to bankrupt the health care system then they would demand action and a reduction of immigration numbers which is why such a discussion is not allowed. But Canadians must decided what they cherish more: mass immigration or health care? I think the choice is obvious.